Free Directive 51 by John Barnes Page A

electricity. So he sent me out to give away a bunch of them ’cause he can’t get the big companies interested. The one on the hood of my truck doesn’t do much for my gas mileage, though.”
    “On the hood of your truck?” another guy, a square-built older type, asked.
    Jason looked at the hood, and said, “Dammit. Third one that’s fallen off. I told Dad they wouldn’t stay on with Liquid Nails.”
    Leprechaun-trucker snorted. “D’you think your dad’s really a genius with no common sense? Or is he just a guy who’s got so little common sense he don’t realize he ain’t a genius?”
    Jason let himself grin broadly. “Well, we lived on his patent money most of the time I was growing up, but the company that paid him didn’t make any of his gadgets; it was some oil company that said ‘the market wasn’t right yet’ for energy-saving gadgets.”
    “Damn,” the big beefy older trucker said. “Of course they said that; why would an oil company want anyone to save energy?”
    “Yeah, I guess. So the patents ran out, the money dried up, and we had to move out to the boondocks to find a place cheap enough for Dad to keep working on his gadgets. Nowadays, the little bit he makes just lets him buy more parts for the next gadget. Doesn’t sound like a lot of common sense, does it?”
    Leprechaun said, “No, it don’t sound like common sense, but I been following Tesla stuff for twenty years on the web, and your dad might just be a genius. Even if he don’t know that Liquid Nails won’t stick a piece of slick glass to a rusty old truck hood.”
    “Well,” Jason said, “I’m supposed to offer one to anyone with a vehicle, and Dad said the bigger the vehicle, the more fuel it would save. They’re solar-powered, they work anywhere on the front of the vehicle where the sun gets in enough to charge it. Maybe we could put one on your grille? I’d hate to screw up the paint job on your hood.”
    Leprechaun-trucker was beaming. “Let’s give it a try. If it don’t work, it weighs what, a couple ounces? And you can’t beat free for a price. I’ll even spring for some of that Superstick High-Temp they sell inside; that keeps trim on a truck, oughta keep one of these on the grille.”
    After he’d equipped all four trucks with an egg on each grille, Jason also gave an egg carton with six more in it for his new Tesla-freak buddy Leprechaun to give to other truckers. “Handle them with gloves only,” he said. “You can trust me that you don’t want to know how much you’re gonna itch—or how much it will spread to anything you touch with your hands—if you don’t. And remember, whether it works or not, we’d sure appreciate a note at three w’s dot tesla hyphen waveflow, dot org, about whatever you observe.”
    “Will do,” the short trucker said, pulling out a ballpoint pen to write it on his hand. Jason spelled it out carefully; there was no such site as far as he knew, but well before Leprechaun might try it, there’d be no web.
    To keep it convincing, Jason was visibly at work, scraping at the rust on the hood of the F-150 to better attach a black egg, as the truckers pulled out. The moment the last truck vanished over the rise, he tossed the egg up onto the flat roof of the little diner, figuring there’d be plenty of sun, and with things like the air-conditioning, satellite antenna, and gadgets inside, there ought to be enough stray electromagnetic fields around as well.
    Then he sloshed Liquid-Plumr over the place on the hood where the black egg had briefly rested. The truck had to make another 250 miles, even a POS this old had an electronic distributor and fuel injection, and with so much ground to cover, Jason couldn’t afford excessive irony.

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. JUST AFTER 1:00 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.
    Edwards, the liaison from FBI, looked around the DoF’s main meeting room, as if seeking support from his dozen other law-enforcement, security, and military